Facebook’s ‘unified inbox’ will make it easier for customers to be heard

Posted 16 November 2016 - 10:50 AM

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Facebook has had a bright idea in terms of helping businesses keep on top of managing their social media – and better responding to customers – with the introduction of a unified inbox for Facebook, Messenger and Instagram.

Rather than trying to juggle comments and responses across these three channels separately, with the new Pages Manager inbox, the social media manager (or team) at a company will have access to them all within this single app.

That means if you fire a complaint across on Instagram, it’ll just as likely be seen as a message posted on Facebook (as opposed to being more likely to be missed when posted on the ‘lesser’ channel).

Thus we can hope for prompter responses, whichever medium is used to message a company, and hopefully less cases where comments fall by the wayside and could end up ignored.

Facebook also noted that the app provides an easy way to glance at basic info about the folks who interact with a business – it’s just a case of tapping their name to see their public profile and previous interactions with the organisation.

Productivity plus

Nicole Chase, admin of Nicssential Oils Silver, told Facebook: "The new and improved inbox gives me a quick snapshot of all media channels in an organised and succinct way. It cuts down the time I spend on administrative tasks by around 12%, and it allows me to provide a more detailed and personalised service."

The new inbox is being rolled out to users of the Pages Manager app (on iOS and Android) over the ‘coming weeks’ according to Facebook, so businesses haven’t got long to wait – and neither have customers who will hopefully feel the benefit as mentioned.

In other recent changes, Facebook is also rolling out the ability to join public chat rooms in Messenger. Currently this feature is only available in Australia and Canada, but it’s likely to spread elsewhere soon enough.